Recent years have seen the widespread use of cameras using CMOS image sensors (solid-state imaging devices).
In the case where such an image sensor is irradiated with high-intensity light, a phenomenon occurs in which a portion that originally is to be bright in an image becomes black. The black portion in the image is also called a sunspot etc., because it looks like a sunspot. The sunspot is caused by fluctuation of a reset level, which occurs when a large amount of charge generated in a photodiode (PD) constituting a pixel leaks to a floating diffusion (FD) or the FD is directly exposed to light.
To correct such a sunspot, limiting the voltage of a vertical signal line so that the reset level does not fluctuate beyond a certain level has been proposed.
For example, Patent Literature 1 describes that a clipping circuit limits the potential of a vertical signal line to different potentials between in reset level reading and in signal level reading.